Recently my father-in-law, Korbul, invited me to tag along with him to an Airstream rally near the Finger Lakes District. Eagerly I accepted his kind offer, not just because each one of the rallies I've attended has been oodles of fun in and of itself, but because each trip I'm able to find caches in places I seldom, if ever, visit. Geocaching in places as gorgeous as the Finger Lakes is pretty special, but even a rally in Crisfield, Maryland, can be exciting and productive and offer exquisite views of nature in all its splendor. I of course ran a pocket query before our trip to Ithaca, in hopes of finding some solvable puzzle caches (my favorite cache type). O, what a wonderful discovery I made, the stellar Game On! series by teamajk, plus a few more of her gems not in the series. Nearly all of those puzzles led me to a drastically new approach to puzzle-crafting, for which I'm truly indebted to her. Sadly, however, I knew nothing at all about The Game of Thrones, upon which the series was largely based, but I managed, with a little help from the CO, to muddle through even the more difficult puzzles, and I highly recommend each and every one of them to you: Game of Stones, Game of Clones, Game of Bones, Zones, Phones, Thrones, Loans, Drones, Knowns, Waiting Game, and Finale—you can easily track them down!
Happily for me, the hides were less than ten miles from the campground where Airstreamers from seemingly every region of the United States had gathered. After finding a few caches in Ithaca, one day I became curious about these Airstreamers, to whom, after all, I was a muggle; so I walked down the line where all the Airstreams were gathered, from pad 601 to 674 (there were over a thousand campsites for RVs in this campground). Virginia was well represented with three rigs, Texas, incredibly, had nine, and three sported plates from South Carolina. Eight rigs had come all the way from Kansas, whose motto I've always preferred to our own.
No contest between "Ad Astra Per Aspera" and "Fatti Maschi, Parole Femine." Unbelievably, five rigs hailed from The Land of Lincoln, a state very dear to me because of the many years I spent at the U of I in Urbana-Champaign, and three traveled up from The Free State, including, of course, Korbul’s. Minnesota, the state of 10,000 lakes, sent four, while The Buckeye State and The Nation’s Dairyland each provided seven. Bourbon was flowing freely near the six Airstreams from Tennessee and the five from Kentucky. "Explore Oklahoma" was on every single one of the nine Airstreams owned by Sooners. (Really? Sort of expected at least ONE of them to mention "Native America"!)
West Virginia plates were on two rigs, and one trailer came up from North Carolina, a state which always makes me think of my grade-school friend Lloyd, who went on to study and practice medicine in Chapel Hill. But friends of a very different sort came to mind when I saw the terse, wry humor of “Great Faces, Great Places” on the only trailer from Nebraska: a refugee family from the Sudan, who’d lost one teenaged son while escaping to Egypt, from where they emigrated to the United States, settling for a year in Westminster, Maryland, and then heading to a thriving neighborhood in Omaha, where many Sudanese lived. Clearly, though, my favorite rig was the only one from Louisiana, an ancient one built in 1964 and only 16 feet long—cute! Caching and Airstreaming--once you combine the two, you’re kinda hooked! I just wish I coulda persuaded Korbul to take the Airstream up to Cincinnati this Spring for GeoWoodstock!
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.